Today was our Jazz musician presentations. It was spectacular! Parents were there to video tape and take pictures and none of the students had stage fright! We had a total of 8 presentations since our homeschooling friends are part of our music class.

The presentations highlighted the musicians music, important aspects of their life and unique qualities that you will remember. For example, Billie Holiday always had a flower in her hair when she performed and always finished her set with "Strange Fruit".

We were able to clean out the garden one morning which was a bit over due. We kept the Kale and the strawberries. The kids had a blast smashing the melons and throwing the tomatoes at the basketball hoop. We left some plants to add organic material to our garden. Next year, each student will have their own garden and be completely in charge of it.

The most exciting news we had this week was our new friends that joined us for Music, PE and Art. During music we had three new homeschooling students. We worked on pitch while getting to know one another, sang a new song in 6/8 time. We used scarves to dance and move to different types of music and picked our favorite song to sing, "Gypsy in the Moonlight". For PE the next day, the same family joined us. Next week we will have one more family join us for a total of 10 students! We started with rules and stretching. Then we organized the game so we could get our heart rates up and then slow them down with the next game. We played "Get Out of Town", "A What?", "Bean Bag Dodge Ball", "The Human Knot", and "Who's it?". Each week we will add at least one new game.

Art has the largest enrollment with 14 students, a total of three families. Thank goodness we have the art room organized to fit all those kids. This week we drew a raccoon peeking out of a hole in a tree. Judd started with a few warm-up activities introducing vocabulary. The next warm up was different parts of the raccoon they needed to copy. This really helped the kids see that the drawing of the raccoon is just a bunch of blobs, straight lines and curved lines. Judd had everyone follow along with him as he walked the kids through drawing the raccoon. It was wonderful to see how the students got excited to look down at their papers to see the raccoon appear as they drew.

We made sunflower seeds. We made the batch 9 times bigger. That was a lot of salt. It was 4.5 cups of salt in 36 cups of water! Whoa!

We took pictures of our costumes. The funniest one was when Parker tried on a 2T costume. We were super models. We looked in a Halloween magazine to see what was the price. We are going to sell them for less.

In art we drew Downy Woodpeckers. We are starting our mural project. Each week we are going to draw an animal that we are going to transfer into our Oak tree.

Music started this week with Betsy! We sang some old songs from last year but learned new ones as well. We have exciting news...we have homeschoolers to join us for Music PE and Art. They will start next week.

On Wednesday we had gym and played the bean bag game. I love that game! Can we have gym everyday?

Claire worked with Parker on his sight words and BJ worked with Lucy.

It's October so we changed the calendar. So far we have had 42 days of school! Everyone from this summer is gonna come back for our 100th day party. Even Dustin!

We made shape poems. It was fun because we worked on art as well. Parker did a police car. BJ did a football field goal. Claire did a rose but it was different than the other students. Lucy did Mickey Mouse.

Beau ran away and rolled in something dead...somewhere. Paula took him home and gave him a bath. He did not like it. The next day he ran across the street. Paula made us brainstorm how we can keep better track of him. We had a lot of good ideas but using an electric fence was our best idea. We will try it on Monday.

Another exciting addition to our library day is when we rent room A there is a black piano in there. It's been in there all year but we didn't think of playing it until Claire wanted to share her recital piece with us. Claire performed for us the first time and now BJ and Lucy have also performed. Then one day, as a few kids were feeding the Iowa fish (in our Art room) and Claire walked over to the piano and played for us. It was beautiful to have her playing while we were working. These student initiated ideas are marvelous.

Author

Laura Wolf is the mother of three children who have attended Prairie Green. Currently, Lucy is in her final year at PGS while her older boys attend West High School. She has also taught grades 3rd-5th and is a media specialist.